In her series “Parallel Text,” Jill Mathis pairs her arresting black and white images with single words that have been embedded within the photograph in order to generate deeper meanings. Through her title choice, Mathis asks the viewer to see more than just a farmer’s field. Included with her image is this caption: “In Latin lera means the ridge left by ploughing. The verb de-lerare means to make an irregular ridge when ploughing. A delirius was one who couldn’t make a straight furrow when ploughing and thus came to mean a crazy or disoriented person.”¹ The word “delirium” here is given two meanings. Her statement underscores a negative meaning; only a crazy person would plow irregular furrows. Yet the Oxford Dictionary’s secondary meaning of the word is “a wild excitement or ecstasy.” The expansive landscape of the Italian countryside seems to better characterize this second meaning. The winding furrows seem less a product of a deranged individual, but rather of a free one: an individual basking in the expansive space of the field and the wildness of the distant snow-capped mountains. The furrows become like the hand-drawn lines of an artist, expressing some inner turmoil or excitement in the midst of the landscape.
-Elizabeth Gouin
1 “Parallel Text: Delirium,” JillMathis.com, accessed July 3, 2015, http://www.jillmathis.com/site/current/current_03.html.
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